Salva Nos
by Iellix
Summary: Danny Quinn's 'classical education comes from an unlikely background. Because Danny Quinn once wanted to become a priest.


You'd never guess it in reading my stuff, but I love Danny Quinn. He's not likely to come back during the next series, which is a shame. I might write some pre-emptive denial-compliant fic involving him. I decided to write this piece of hypothetical backstory about him based solely on the fact that he speaks (or at least understands) a little Latin. As you can probably tell, I am not a religious person. The lyric comes from a song by a group called The Medieval Baebes called 'Salva Nos'.

Disclaimer: I do not own Danny Quinn, 'Primeval', or the song 'Salva Nos'.

* * *

"_Salva nos, Stella Maris, et Regina Celorum."_

o…o

Sarah Page smirks at the idea that a burly, hardass, gun-toting copper like Danny Quinn has a 'classical education' and can understand Latin, and he lets her and everyone else think of it as an eccentricity and an anomaly in an otherwise easily-understood exterior. What they don't know—what _no one_ knows—is that Danny Quinn was once a fire-breathing Catholic, intent on becoming a priest.

He and his brother were brought up religious by their mother, a single parent with devout and—looking back on it—misplaced faith in a higher power, who passed along her beliefs to her sons. His little brother, eight years Danny's junior, didn't take to it so well but Danny was just as religious, and as the years went on and he studied for seminary school. His belief became more and more intense—so much so that it bordered on self-parody.

Then his brother disappeared, and he channelled his grief into fanaticism. His mother took refuge in her faith and the knowledge that her son was 'in a better place' and 'in the bosom of the Queen of Heaven', and Danny knew he was supposed to feel the same way but somehow the thought brought no comfort, only anger. The only prevailing thought is _why?_ If his god is all-loving and all-powerful, then why did he take an innocent young kid away like that? Why are there no answers? Why is he perpetrator—in the court of popular opinion—still at large? Why is there no justice?

"The final justice awaits us in death," he told himself, like if he told himself enough he'd believe it and it would be true but it never does. He tried to do some homework, some reading, to find answers in books where he couldn't in faith. But to his horror, the more he read the more questions he found. The Bible, the Qur'an, the Talmud—all full of contradictions and horrors that the aspiring priest in him never saw before and they scared him and confused him. It revealed a religion farmed from select pieces of other religions, stories told before, dogma stolen from elsewhere. Doubt was the most frightening thing he ever experienced before, moreso than grief and Hell combined.

Uncertain, scared, and full of doubt, Danny Quinn left the seminary in a daze of confusion. The friends who hadn't already drifted away from him turned their backs on him as he drifted away from their common ground in religion. His mother, unhappy with his de-conversion becoming more and more apparent, became more distant. She used the same damnations and arguments and Pascal's Wager on him that he so often used on others. But by then, shaken from his faith and broken by grief, the damage was already done.

He never wanted to be a cop but he decided that at least there he could track down the oily little monster who killed his brother. Better than being a priest with doubt, selling a faith he himself didn't even have anymore. There was probably no god, no higher power that observed but never intervened. He couldn't accept it, couldn't believe. Anomaly work was the final nail in the coffin, proof positive of the fact that his faith wasn't true.

He scarcely looked back.

Even so, there were some things he could never shake. It doesn't take any thought on his part to run after Helen Cutter. There is no guarantee he'll be able to stop her doing what evil she has planned, but if anything by now he knows there's no such thing as a guarantee.

But that doesn't stop him murmuring a little prayer as he jumps through the anomaly after her, directed at whatever might be listening to him.

"Salva nos."

'_Save us.'_


End file.
